mTrends – mobile media lifestyle trends – m-trends.org

It has been a crazy two weeks… I just got back from the Mobile Web 2.0 Conference in London, a lot of great folks and impressions. More on this later here… But before that, I still need to wrap-up the MobileMonday Global Summit adventures from last week

Checking my mailbox, I received some private beta invites from Taptu, a new ‘open’ Mobile Search application. Founder and CEO, Steve Ives showed me a demo last week in Helsinki and I was delightfully surprised. I gave him a hard time finding some unusual music artists and the app always returned a lot of relevant info and song previews to listen to, all nicely designed in a super simple design interface – reminded me of the Google early days, but then on mobile, very promising…

In fact, Taptu bought one of the earliest mobile search apps around (I blogged about it 2 years ago here), and is thus, amongst others, crawling the wikipedia index for results. Steve came introducing his new technology – as he calls it Social-assisted Search, at MobileMonday Barcelona in April on a panel with Google, Yahoo! and JumpTap on Mobile Search. I remember thinking one needs a lot of guts and talent to start with such an adventure and such a competition in sight… meanwhile Taptu secured an A-round of funding and has 30 people working on the technology in Cambridge. Russell commented yesterday that it might be kind-a late to enter the Mobile Search market but I give them a fair chance.

Anyone can sign up for the private beta, but invitations will be released on-the-go during this month until public beta release during the month of October. So feel free to send me an email if you would like to receive a private beta invitation.

You can follow Taptu’s adventure status on their blog – http://www.taptu.com/blog/.